Word: beckett
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Play, by Samuel Beckett, is about three people in urns. What they are doing in these urns, whether they are dead or alive in these urns, and what they discuss in he course of this play are question I can't answer. But if you're a Beckett fan, you might want to investigate them on your own. At the Newbury Street Theatre, 15 Newbury St. in Boston, tonight and tomorrow. Tickets...
Krapp's Last Tape, one of Samuel Beckett's best-known plays, is being performed tonight only at Emmanuel Church, 15 Newbury St. in Boston. It's a one-man show, so a lot depends on the acting of the guy who plays Krapp, an eccentric old man who keeps a recorded diary, making one tape each year. The action of the play consists of Krapp playing one tape and making another. The cast of this production consists of Jim Cooke, a member of the Cambridge Ensemble and a teacher of theater education at Emerson College. At 8 p.m., tickets...
...take a condescending view of the work, meeting at its heavy doses of nostalgia, sentimentality, and homespun platitudes. But if the realm of art is wide enough to contain such bleak and pessimistic views of man and the world as Shakespeare's King Lear, Sartre's No Exit, and Beckett's Endgame, then it is wide enough to contain Wilder's warm, gentle, compassionate and hopeful approach. Wilder early reacted against the tradition of naturalism, with its emphasis on the seamy and sordid side of life, and has by nature tended to look through rose-colored glasses. But anyone...
...BECKETT-LIKE non-sequiturs garbed in Shakespearean soliloquies this play may be--what more winning combination--yet however lavish the praise it has garnered, a main part of this production's problems lie within the play itself. A full-scale production of it is simply too long. And even the much-touted tensile strength of its brilliant wordplay and verbosity cannot sustain such ceaseless action. Compounded with this intrinsic difficulty is director Jeff Melvoin's decision to present the play at a grinding, almost gesture-tableau pace. Muffled by the heavy directorial hand, ordered to understatement, most of the actors...
...Beckett's peculiar genius is to set up such Hobson's choices while squeezing them for all the farce they will yield. His is a Buster Keaton, deadpan humor that shrivels in the explaining. Mercier and Camier is as hilarious, in gasps, as anything he has written. The novel's coolly mannered prose disguises outrageous statements until the instant they land. There is also cruelty in Beckett's method (Mercier is comforted briefly by the sight of a dead and bleeding wom an) and surprising moments of compassion. When Mercier and Camier part, they lose...